Swinging for a Top Search Engine Ranking

As I sit looking out the window at a dreary Cleveland day, I daydream about spring, and how I cannot wait to be out on the links enjoying one of my favorite things, golf.

Granted, I will spare you the details of my golf game (it’s not so great), but it did get me to start thinking about new clubs, new shoes and maybe a few new golf shirts. With this in mind, I wanted to do a little online shopping. And since I am currently in my Web Analytics and SEO class, I thought this would be the perfect opportunity to compare search engine ranking results for some golf stores.

In this blog post, I will be looking at the SEO techniques certain companies employed in order to increase its ranking among four popular search engines. The companies I will analyze are the ones that appear first and at the top of the fourth page in a Google search. Golfsmith was first, and ranking in at number 40 was Golf USA Stores.

Why did Golfsmith rank so high, and Golf USA Stores rank lower? It is most likely because of each company’s search engine optimization techniques. In order for a company to rank high on Google, the following techniques must be employed: keyword usage in domain, body and tag, outgoing links, internal links, site freshness and more (Vaughns.com, 2007). Here is a complete listing of what Google looks for.

Based on other searches, here is what Google truly measures in ranking a site: links, domain age, click through rates, trends, fads, posting frequency and keywords.

Golfsmith does just this. The key words “golf store” is prominently placed in both the pages and the title of the site itself. Yet, the company does more than effective keyword usage. It has a highly integrated and linked site. In fact, according to SEO positions, a Web site dedicated to SEO strategy, the best way of increasing your search engine rankings is working to improve your Web site’s link popularity (seopositions.net, 2009). These include inbound links to social media sites as well as internal links on the site. In total, according to LinkScape.com, Golfsmith is linked to 50 domains and 121 links.

Internal linking is done extremely well on the Golfsmith site. There is a site map and then individual listings for the different links within the site. This makes the site appear to be frequently updated, which is appealing for search engines since they are looking for newer sites and content. In addition, the company also links to its Facebook and Twitter pages; thus increasing traffic and search engine placement.

In addition, Goldsmith also runs a monthly contest, which increases site traffic. See the success of the Goldsmith site here.

Golf USA fails at SEO for the following reasons. It does not include the keywords in the page title, or even the home page. One does not discover any links until clicking from a page on the home page. Links are buried, and there are not many inbound links to the site. Instead, there are internal links all to Golf USA locations throughout the country. In fact, according to LinkScape.com, Golf USA is only liked to 15 domains and 44 links. That is quite a difference from the number one spot.

Now that I saw how and why these companies ranked where they did on Google. I took this experiment to three other search engines: Yahoo, Bing and Ask. Golfsmith, with its strong SEO presence, ranked first on Yahoo and second on both Bing and Ask. This was to be expected because of the site’s strong SEO tactics that have been employed. What was shocking though was the ranking of Golf USA. While the company did rank 40th on Ask, the same ranking it had on Google, it was a strong nine on Yahoo and ranked fourteenth on Bing. Why is this?

The fact of the matter is that Bing looks at different factors than Google. According to the SEO Wizz blog, in an effort to increase presence on this search engine, a site needs to increase its domain age and target anchor percentage, or the percentage of backlinks that are anchored with your target keyword (seowizz.net, 2009). This may be why Golf USA is succeeding on Bing because Bing does not necessarily take into account the quantity or quality of the backlinks, just an overall percentage (seowizz.net, 2009).

Just as Bing differs from Google, so does Yahoo have its differences. According to Jim Karter’s blog on internet marketing, Yahoo takes the following factors into consideration:
· Correct HTML
· Fresh Content - Yahoo likes fresh content more than Google.
· More Links From Yahoo Sites
· Yahoo uses meta keywords tags for categorization of your site
· Yahoo gives more weightage to on-site SEO factors like title, headings, keyword-in-domain etc., than Google
· Yahoo prefers a keyword density little higher than Google
· Links from article directories
· More weightage to age of the site than Google
· Yahoo considers click-popularity also in SERPs (Karter, 2009).

Ask.com appears to take on the same characteristics of Google when it comes to understanding searches. http://www.seobythesea.com/?p=634

These factors demonstrate to me why Golf USA’s search engine rankings very so much, and why Golfsmith’s remain consistent. Essentially, Golfsmith optimized its site for all search engines, whereas it appears that Golf USA did not. Golf USA may want to go back and re-optimize its site, especially for Google, since that is the top search engine.

References
Vaughns.com (2007). Google Ranking Factors: SEO Checklist. Retrieved January 22, 2010, from http://www.vaughns-1-pagers.com/internet/google-ranking-factors.htm

Seopositions.net (2009). Increase SEO link popularity. SEO Positions Blog. Retrieved January 22, 2010, from http://www.seopositions.net/blog/seo/293/seo-link-popularity-create-top-ranking-sites-now.html

SEOWizz.net (2009). A Further Bing SEO Update. SEO Wiz Blog. Retrieved January 22, 2010, from http://www.seowizz.net/2009/06/a-further-bing-seo-update.html

Karter, J. (2009). Yahoo Search Ranking Factors. Jim Karter’s Blog. Retrieved January 22, 2010, from http://www.jimkarter.com/2009-08-27-yahoo-search-ranking-factors.html